The next front in Facebook's misinformation battle: climate change

These examples have been flagged by Facebook (FB) staff on the corporate's inner website, in response to paperwork reviewed by CNN Business. These have been a part of the a whole bunch of inner firm paperwork included as proof to help disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and offered to Congress in redacted kind by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's authorized counsel. A consortium of reports organizations, together with CNN, reviewed the redacted variations acquired by Congress.

The paperwork spotlight how, for years, some staff of the social media firm — which just lately modified its title to Meta — have raised alarms about climate change misinformation spreading on its platforms, and referred to as on the corporate to do more to crack down on it.

There has lengthy been public stress on the social media firm to take motion on climate change misinformation. In March, CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted to lawmakers that "climate misinformation ... is a big issue."

Although Facebook has taken plenty of steps in latest years to deal with climate change misinformation, it has to this point resisted calls to take away such content material altogether, the way in which it does for Covid-19 or election misinformation. Instead, it has targeted on efforts to advertise good data and depends on third-party reality checkers to label false claims. Meta has repeatedly mentioned the "Facebook Papers" paint a skewed image of the corporate and its efforts. The firm mentioned the inner paperwork underscore "the reasons why we've launched our Climate Science Center and has informed our approach to connecting people with authoritative information about climate change from the world's leading climate change organizations.""As a result, more than 100,000 people are visiting the Climate Science Center every day and we're continuing to update it with new features and more actionable resources so people know how they can make a difference," Meta spokesperson Kevin McAlister mentioned in an announcement to CNN Business. He added that on Facebook Search and Watch, the corporate has eliminated climate denial ideas and now directs customers to the Climate Science Center and different authoritative data sources, and that misinformation makes up solely a small share of all climate-related content material on the corporate's platforms. Experts, nevertheless, say the stakes couldn't be increased for Facebook to additional ramp up its options for this downside — and shortly. "Given that [climate change] is an existential threat, we can't be casual about the seriousness about the threat of climate misinformation," mentioned John Cook, a post-doctoral analysis fellow on the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University. "It needs to be addressed with the same level of urgency and proactiveness that they're showing with Covid-19 and election misinformation."

The shortcomings of Facebook's climate misinformation technique

But the corporate's inner paperwork recommend there could also be obstacles to successfully countering misinformation with the Climate Science Center. "Facebook is a key place for people to get information related to climate change, so there is an opportunity to build knowledge through our platform," in response to one inner report posted in April. However, the researchers discovered consumer consciousness of the Climate Science Center was low. The report mentioned 66% of customers surveyed who had visited the middle "say they are not aware" of it; 86% of those that hadn't visited it mentioned they did not learn about it. The report additionally discovered that some customers didn't belief the data Facebook printed in its Climate Science Center, particularly US customers. This tracks with analysis on the consequences of climate misinformation, in response to Cook.

"Providing facts is necessary but it's insufficient to deal with misinformation," Cook mentioned, including that his and others' analysis has discovered that "misinformation can cancel out facts." For instance, if a Facebook submit says one factor and a fact-check label says one other, it might probably go away a consumer confused and believing neither. An efficient technique to deal with climate misinformation "needs to be a mix of providing facts and countering misinformation with fact checking, but also there need to be efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation or to bring down misinformation," Cook mentioned.

Facebook says it does "downrank," or cut back the unfold, of climate change content material that third-party reality checkers have labeled as false, and says "we take action" in opposition to pages, teams or accounts that usually share false claims about climate science. "We work with a global network of over 80 independent fact-checking organizations who review and rate content, including climate content, in more than 60 languages," the corporate mentioned in weblog submit Monday. "When they rate content as false, we add a warning label and move it lower in News Feed so fewer people see it. We don't allow ads that have been rated by one of our fact-checking partners." But it does not outright take away climate change misinformation — one thing it does do for misinformation about Covid-19, vaccines and elections.

However, environmental advocates say climate change does certainly current imminent threats to security. "People around the US have faced harm from extreme events just in the last few months with Hurricane Ida and people dying, wildfires across the West and extreme heat in the Northwest," mentioned Kathy Mulvey, accountability marketing campaign director for the Climate & Energy crew on the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Climate change is not a threat in the future, it's a reality in the present."